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Repeats on podcasts don’t always make a lot of sense, but if you are subscribed, you’ll know that I put up a podcast from 2019 into the feed again last week; the podcast was an investigation into RTÉ and their relationship with the AA which supplied them with AA Roadwatch, the erstwhile traffic news segments.
The issue that I focussed on was that the supply of staff and studios for RTÉ quite clearly met RTÉ’s definition of a sponsored programme, and quite clearly breached RTÉ’s rules against accepting sponsorship from political lobbyists, and against accepting sponsorship from businesses with an interest in the content of the sponsored programme, and against allowing the sponsor to have any say in the content of the sponsored programme.
In that podcast I said that the response of RTÉ to my questioning was basically stonewalling. I asked them about breaching sponsorship rules, they said that it wasn’t a sponsored programme. I pointed them to their own criteria of what counted as a sponsored programme, and that AA Roadwatch clearly met those criteria, and at various stages they promised to get back to me with answers, they promised to tell me what exactly AA Roadwatch was if it wasn’t a sponsored programme, I sent many reminders over months, but they never did.
Since that podcast was first released, AA Roadwatch was scrapped by the AA.
One of the reasons that I repeated that podcast was because of the current corruption scandal within RTÉ. The mission statement that we have for this podcast, Here’s How is to cover things that are under-covered in other Irish media, and the current scandal is a lot of things, but I don’t think that it is under-covered.
That said, I think that there is an aspect of this that is getting, to say the very least, less coverage than it deserves. Inevitably, there is a temptation to cover the glitzy aspect of this story, when it relates to TV stars, it’s difficult not to get caught up in the sordid details, and I think that a wider story is being missed because of that.
Kudos to Imelda Munster, Sinn Féin’s Louth TD who did a better job than most in trying to nail down Noel Kelly, the agent of Ryan Tubridy and other RTÉ stars who is at the centre of this scandal.
What Imelda Munster was trying to nail down there was exactly how this dodgy deal got agreed. The secret payments were being routed through Renault Ireland to disguise their origin, and were paid on foot of invoices which did not bear Tubridy’s name, obviously to try not to attract the attention of anyone who might ask awkward questions.
Kelly, you hear there is trying to shrug his shoulders and say ‘nothing to do with me, guv’, and points to a memo to the agreement from RTÉ, to him, instructing him not to include Tubridy’s name on the invoice, as though he had no idea why they might say that, when they all were perfectly aware that Tubridy had gotten stick in public over his salary, and none of them wanted these secret payments to leak out.
There Kelly and Tubridy are trying to maintain the line that the secret payments were not really from RTÉ. Now, I’m careful about the defamation laws on this podcast, but I have no hesitation in saying that’s a lie. To the extent that they are claiming that the secret payments originated from Renault Ireland, Noel Kelly is lying, and Ryan Tubridy is lying.
The money was essentially laundered through Renault Ireland to disguise its origin, to hide the fact that this was a payment of RTÉ’s money – taxpayers’ money – that was not being included in the publicly-declared salary for Tubridy.
And they weren’t the only people lying.
That’s Aoife Hegarty, a journalist from the RTÉ Investigates unit; hats off to her for reporting on this, you can well imagine many RTÉ journalists wouldn’t want to touch this with a bargepole, it could well be career suicide.
So I can be forgiving about the fact that she is a bit coy about how she describes Dee Forbes, the now ex-Director General of RTÉ, ‘revising’ her explanation of this payment. It’s obvious that Forbes straight up lied about this to RTÉ’s auditors, and she only fessed up when she was caught.
I want to be fair to Aoife Hegarty and others in RTÉ who have reported on this in what can only be difficult circumstances. RTÉ is not a monolith, and there are good people trying hard to do a good job there, despite the fact that the organisation as a whole has serious systemic problems. In that same report, Hegarty has some more revelations.
With all due respect to Aoife Hegarty, that is the wrong focus. For sure, those things, 70 RTÉ people going on luxury outings to the K Club, they make great tabloid headlines, but they obscure the real story.
The media is an important part of our democracy.
The coverage of politics is important, of course, but the coverage of the wider issues of how the economy and big business impact our lives is just as vital.
That’s where the context of this podcast’s mission statement – covering under-covered stories – that’s where that comes up. Why in the hell has nobody – nobody on the Oireachtas committees, no journalist covering this, certainly not Aoife Hegarty, not Mícheál Lehane, not Paul Cunningham – why in hell has not one of them asked Renault Ireland what in the name of bejayzus were they doing participating in this corrupt scheme to mislead the Dáil and mislead the public about Ryan Tubridy’s salary?
Accountants are famously cautious and risk-averse. According to the information in the public domain, they had no financial motive, the scheme was designed to be exactly revenue-neutral for Renault Ireland. What sort of eejits Renault being, getting mixed up in a scam that was at best a serious reputational risk for them; at worst potentially it was a criminal enterprise. Why didn’t they tell Dee Forbes and Noel Kelly to take a running jump, and why doesn’t anyone ask them why they didn’t tell Dee Forbes and Noel Kelly to take a running jump?
I’ll tell you why; because the relationship between RTÉ and the motor industry is a million miles away from being a normal commercial relationship. The motor industry is gigantic. Remember not a single car has been manufactured in Ireland in decades, but the total revenue from car sales alone in Ireland is well over €3bn per year, and over half of that is in the hugely profitable SUV market.
To be clear, that is just cars, it doesn’t count commercial vehicles, motorbikes or anything else. And if own a car, you will be acutely aware that buying the car is by no means the only expense. Vast amounts of are spent on fuel, on insurance, on repairs and maintenance – and it’s no coincidence that all those markets are very prominent advertisers on TV and radio.
But gigantic as that spend is, it’s not even close to the total. There’s a lot of talk about the hard-pressed over-taxed motorist, but the reality is that motoring is expensive because it costs a lot of money, and the extra taxes that motorists pay, VRT and motor tax and the like, they don’t come remotely close to the covering what the exchequer spends on motoring.
Take the Castlebar bypass for example, a single 25-kilometre stretch of road in a relatively remote area of the country cost €300m to build. It, and dozens of other chunks of motorway and other roads have been built around the country, not without controversy, but with comparatively little fuss compared to the decades-long national saga that was building the Luas. It’s worth noting that each of the original two Luas lines built were in the same ballpark for both length and cost as the Castlebar bypass, despite the Castlebar bypass going through some of the cheapest and emptiest land in the country, and the Luas going through the most expensive and most densely populated areas of the country.
There have been campaigns against various road projects, almost all of them failed, but they had nothing like the intensity of the campaign against the Luas, which had a huge amount of media access, and was highly organised, not least by the AA. And, as I said before, that campaign was supported by thousands of mentions on AA Roadwatch of the alleged traffic congestion that was all the fault of Luas works.
It’s important to remember that that campaign against the Luas was at least partially successful. The original Luas system wasn’t a system at all, it was two unconnected lines, because the AA and their allies had managed to punch a hole in the heart of the system, preventing them from linking up. That one decision cost taxpayers hundreds of millions to be fixed, and millions of hours of wasted time trying to schlep from one line to another.
And, as I say, each line was not much different in cost or length to the Castlebar bypass, despite the Luas having much more building challenges, but the sheer volume of the discussion of its cost meant that that was not the impression the public was left with.
You might point out that the campaign to stop the Luas was ultimately unsuccessful, but I don’t agree. The project was first seriously proposed by the Dublin Transportation Initiative in 1981, but it took 15 years until 1996 for the Transport Act to be passed to authorise its construction. It took until 2004 before it was opened, and the two lines weren’t joined until 2017, 36 years after the initial proposal. The third planned line to Ballymun has still not been built, 42 years after it was proposed.
To put that in context, in the French city of Lyon, very similar to Dublin in size, took a decision to build a tram network in 1996. Their first two lines were up and running within four years, the third line was opened in 2006, and more new lines opened in each of 2009, 2012, 2019 and 2021, so the system now has seven lines with a total length of 96km, compared to the Luas’s 42km.
But the real issue here is that all the hullabaloo over the Luas soaked up a huge amount of energy that might have gone to debating and planning what would be the best transport options for Ireland, so we stay frozen in a system where, aside from the Luas, the only development in our transport infrastructure since the bulk of our railway system was closed after independence is the building of a huge amount of roads.
One result of that is the huge congestion that Irish commuters face every day. Ireland has far fewer cars than most other western European countries, but we have to drive them much, much more. Irish people can only manage to travel an average of about 180km by train each year, less than half the distance of the average Norwegian, that’s the next lowest country in western Europe, with all other countries at much higher figures; the French travel an average of more than 1,000km per year each by rail, for example.
Ireland is by far the Western European country with the lowest population density, but despite all our space, many of us face horrendous congestion, nearly 40 per cent of employees, spend an hour or more a day commuting, and one in eight take more than two hours a day, that’s right at the top of the league of Western European countries.
Two hours a day, that’s ten hours a week, that’s a whole nother part-time job that you don’t get paid for, you mostly have to drive, so you can’t do anything productive, and it’s horrendously expensive.
So you can understand why more than half of new car are SUVs, if people have to spend so much time in their cars, it’s not surprising that they want them to be comfortable and to be prestigious, which is exactly the way that SUVs are marketed.
Now you’d think that this issue, which is stealing the time, and the health, the physical and even mental health of so many Irish people, and the fact that Ireland is such an outlier, doing so much worse than our neighbours, you’d think public service broadcasting would cover that extensively and consistently. We are the customers, and we are paying for programming to keep us informed, to challenge authority, and to challenge us with new ideas.
So you’d think that the failings of our transport policy would be front and centre for our national broadcaster.
You’d think. But instead we get this.
You might expect that type of banter on GB news, but that is pretty typical of the type of coverage that this issue gets on RTÉ. We now know that not only was that programme sponsored by a car manufacturer, but the presenter there, physically throwing a cycle helmet into a rubbish bin, was deeply personally compromised by a secret financial deal facilitated by that car manufacturer.
Is Tubridy serving them, or us?
Now, I’ve nothing against them, but with commercial broadcasters, their product is not the programme. Their product is us, the audience and their customer is the advertiser and. It really is true that if you aren’t paying for the product, then you are the product.
That’s where the conflict for RTÉ comes in. RTÉ gets the licence fee, it gets millions in direct funding from the taxpayer, and it gets millions more in soft advertising contracts from the state that are really just thinly-disguised subsidies.
But for more than half its revenue, it relies on advertising and sponsorship, and a huge portion comes from the motor industry. These are multi-billion euro companies, and if you imagine that they don’t use to their advantage the leverage that their huge advertising spend gives them, then I have a motorway flyover to sell you.
And by the way, I’m not suggesting that anyone at Renault Ireland, or the AA, or any other motor industry lobbyists rings up someone at RTÉ and says, hey could throw in a few digs on the Late Late Show against public transport or cycling. In fact, I’m pretty sure that does not happen.
They are far too smart for that.
But what they do is slowly, subtly, over time they give favours, or give a dig-out, or look the other way when questionable deals are being done. Remember that Renault didn’t get a cent out of the three-way deal to funnel money to Tubridy.
Senator Timmy Dooley said publicly that he had information that an RTÉ personality had been given the free use of a car by a car company, and sports presenter Marty Morrisey issued a statement that it was him, he got a free car for five years on ‘loan’, no questions asked. Looking online a Renault Austral, for example costs up to €900 per month to lease, so that gift was worth maybe €50 grand or more. I’d be interested to see how Marty Morrisey reported that in his tax return, but I’d be much more interested to see how the car firm classified it in their accounts.
Then hilariously, Timmy Dooley that he hadn’t been referring to Marty Morrisey at all, he was talking about someone else in RTÉ, so we know that this was not a once off.
If you remember what I said two podcasts ago about the retrospective discounts paid to advertising agencies, it seems advertisers have been significantly over-paying for advertising. Could big advertisers like Renault really be so dumb as not to notice that a big chunk of their advertising spend was being diverted to pay for luxury trips to the K Club for hordes of RTÉ staff. Of course not. So what’s in it for them?
The answer is leverage.
These big businesses are not fools. They wouldn’t be throwing away that sort of money, if they didn’t think that they were getting good value for it.
And what better value could they get than the guilty complicity of so many RTÉ staff? That is worth more than gold-dust to an industry that is burning up the planet, and highly vulnerable to being basically closed down if politicians are exposed to enough public pressure to act on the science of climate change.
And the payoff for the motor industry in investing in showering RTÉ and their staff with freebies is pretty impressive. RTÉ news and current affairs are not presenters are strictly banned from advertising, even doing a voiceover, because the credibility with the public that they gain from being a journalist, paid by the public, that credibility would then be for sale to whatever advertiser wanted to buy it.
And the loss of credibility that a journalist would get from being a corporate spokesperson, would inevitably – and quite rightly – undermine the credibility of their journalism. Now, Diarmuid Gavin is not a journalist, but he presents a lot of factual programmes for RTÉ about gardening and mentioning a lot of environmental issues. It’s obvious that are very closely adjacent to topics that are prominent in the news, such as climate change.
And it’s also obvious that Diarmuid Gavin has credibility with the public because of those RTÉ programmes that he makes, so that’s what makes him valuable to Land Rover, not his skill as an actor for this ad, but his believability when he tells their pack of lies for brand that is paying him.
This ad was slammed as misleading by the advertising self-regulation body the ASAI, but RTÉ has nothing to say about it.
Another presenter or RTÉ factual programmes, Kathryn Thomas appeared in a similar ad, and RTÉ were asked whether she had permission from them endorse the greenwashing of a gas-guzzling SUV, which is required in some circumstances. But RTÉ’s loyalty to the motor industry is so much stronger than their loyalty to the public who pay their salaries, that they just flat out refused to answer.
I sent a list of questions to Renault’s PR firm, I asked why they took part in the scheme to secretly funnel RTÉ money to Ryan Tubridy. They refused to answer.
I asked Renault when they became aware that the scheme was used to falsely report Tubridy’s salary to the Oireachtas and the public. They refused to answer.
I asked Renault if they had taken part in similar schemes before. They refused to answer.
I asked Renault if they were confident that all of the money they paid for advertising was being spent on advertising, and in particular if any of it was diverted for the private benefit of RTÉ employees or others. They refused to answer.
I asked if they had supplied free cars to Marty Morrisey or anyone else, and if so, how were they reported in their accounts. They refused to answer.
I’m just doing a little voluntary podcast, I can email questions, and tell you that I got no answer, but not much more. RTÉ is supported by billions from the public purse. It’s their job, if answers aren’t forthcoming, to doorstep Renault executives, ask them the questions, and show the footage of them running away from the camera crew and hiding under a newspaper to avoid those questions, if that’s what is required to illustrate the story to the audience.
Now corporations do what corporations do. We might not like it, but we’re not surprised by it. The real failure here is by RTÉ. To put this in context it’s worth remembering that RTÉ’s public service remit is very much based on the BBC. But one enormous difference between the way the BBC and RTÉ work is the BBC’s capacity for putting criticism from its audience, and from itself on the air.
BBC Radio 4 has its programme Feedback …
the programme holds to account producers and editors and it’s pretty clear that part of their job description is to come on air and justify their decisions.
Points of view on BBC television is a more soft-focus affair, but it airs correspondence from viewers and listeners, and gives those opinions legitimacy.
Also on BBC TV is Newswatch, rather more hard hitting, and puts journalists on the spot to answer viewers criticism of how the news is reported and presented.
It doesn’t end with factual programming. Charlie Brooker’s satire often focused at the lazy visual grammar of TV news, as well as sharp criticism of news values.
He took up the mantle where the brilliant Day Today left off.
In case you didn’t recognise the voice, that was the programme that launched the career of Alan Partridge, as portrayed by Steve Coogan, which has been a huge hit for the BBC, not least because of its willingness to allow itself to be mocked on-air. Taking risks like this pays off.
So what does RTÉ have? What options do RTÉ’s listeners and viewers have if they think that the performance of our national broadcaster isn’t up to scratch.
Well they don’t have any options at all that don’t require the use of a time machine, because the asinine Mailbag went off the air in 1996 and since then, as far as I can tell, RTÉ has not allowed for any regular programming that questions any aspect of their decision-making in nearly 30 years.
So if RTÉ won’t account for itself on its own airwaves, I decided to try to get in touch to give RTÉ the opportunity to answer some questions on this podcast. I made about 40 telephone calls, and sent a similar number of emails.
I called Rayna Connery of RTÉ’s corporate communications department, and asked her to supply a speaker for the podcast, and answer some questions. She asked me to put the questions in email, which I did. The questions were not answered.
In fairness to Rayna about two weeks later, when I sent a reminder, she texted me that she was on sick leave and referred me to her colleague Sharon Brady. I emailed Sharon. She did not reply.
I emailed my list of questions to Neil O’Gorman, RTÉ’s corporate communications manager, centring on the question of whether the issue of false accounting arises out of all of this. False accounting is a serious criminal offence, it carries a jail term of up to 10 years, and it’s defined as when someone
- dishonestly, with the intention of making a gain for themselves or someone else, or of causing loss to anyone
- when they destroy, deface, conceal or falsify any account or any document made or required for any accounting purpose,
- or where they fail to make or complete any such document – any document needed for a company’s accounts
- or where they give any document or any information, which they know may be misleading
- or if they concur with anyone else doing that
- or if they omit or concur with someone else omitting relevant information from a company’s accounts
That’s false accounting. The definition is really broad. Remember that Dee Forbes repeatedly gave a totally false explanation of those invoices that were sent by Noel Kelly. She said that they were for consultancy work done by Kelly himself. These were the same invoices where he had been told by RTÉ to leave Tubridy’s off the invoice, even though they were for Tubridy’s benefit; and she gave that information, Forbes gave that false information to try to get RTÉ’s auditor’s off the trail of the secret payments.
Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I certainly couldn’t exclude the possibility that that would meet the definition of false accounting, and if I was a responsible person in a major company, and I had even a shadow of doubt, I would call the gardaí, and let them decide what the appropriate next step was.
I got a half-answer to one of my questions from RTÉ’s Neil O’Gorman; he wrote “RTÉ has not contacted the Gardaí as it has received external legal advice that there is no fraud or illegality.”
Now, that sounds like they have been told that they have legal advice that there were no laws broken, but I had asked for sight of any legal advice RTÉ had, and why and when and by whom it was sought, and Neil refused to answer any of those questions. I was particularly concerned that I had specifically asked about false accounting, and I didn’t like the way that Neil rephrased my question before answering it. His answer didn’t exclude the possibility that the legal advice had been requested and given before the facts that suggest false accounting were known.
So I replied to Neil, asking him about that again, and specifically asking when the advice was given and whether it referred to false accounting. He refused to answer.
I emailed both him and Rayna Connery several more times, as well as their colleagues Sharon Brady, Sarah Neville, Jennifer O’Brien, Joseph Hoban, Laura Fitzgerald and Maureen Catterson. None of them answered. I called all of them, and apart from that first call to Rayna Connery, none picked up the phone and none of them responded to voice messages I left.
It’s pretty astonishing that a company that has such a large corporate communications team, paid on the public dime, doesn’t have the time or the courtesy to actually answer any queries.
I think if you want to understand the attitude from many of the elite in RTÉ towards the questioning of their corporate misbehaviour, you can have a look a Dave Fanning’s comment where he referred to Oireachtas members questioning RTÉ about this corruption scandal as the ‘Nuremberg trials’. He later apologised, but really he was just saying the quite bit out loud; the indignation that many in RTÉ feel at even the thought that anyone would question their right to a seat on the gravy train.
And, you know, €5,000 for flip flops, it’s outrageous, but I really don’t care. What I care about, what really makes me angry is that when we’ve seen a judge refuse to prosecute people for having no TV licence, that’s hardly unreasonable, and when we see a 27 per cent drop in people paying the licence in July; there are many people in RTÉ who seem perfectly happy to burn down the whole concept public sector broadcasting, just to keep their gravy warm.
Before I go on, I want to say thanks to all of the patrons Patreon, I really appreciate everyone who donates.
As we have seen, public sector broadcasting in Ireland is in an existential crisis. I was genuinely shocked in the past couple of weeks at the level of indignation, at the real outrage by many of the people I dealt with in RTÉ that anyone would have the audacity to ask them to account for how they spent what they clearly see as their money.
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If you are a low-paid social media gopher for any of the established radio stations or newspapers, if your job is to get engagement for the company website, there’s no better hot button topic that than pitting cyclists against motorists; it’s guaranteed to get people rage clicking, and to make the algorithm push your content up to the top of the news feed.
So here we go.
And when you run a cyclists-versus-motorists story, you can be sure that there will be a storm of comments all making the same point: “So a drunken driver with a suspended licence drives a three ton SUV at twice the speed limit on the wrong side of the road ploughs into a nine-year-old girl out on her bike, and leaves her in a wheelchair for life? So what? She wasn’t wearing a helmet, it was her own fault.”
There’s a lot of myths around cycle helmets.
The first myth to dispel is that cycle helmets are not designed to protect a cyclist who is involved in a crash. In case you didn’t catch that, I’ll say it again. Cycle helmets are not designed to protect a cyclist hit by a motor vehicle.
It’s not just me saying that, that is the CE design standard – as it says on the leaflet you get in the box with any cycle helmet. Cycle helmets are designed to protect a cyclist who falls from their bike to the ground. They are simply not designed to protect a cyclist who is hit by a motor vehicle. That’s just not something that a few grams or Styrofoam could do. And that’s what Eric Richter, the senior executive at Giro, one of the biggest cycle helmet manufacturers says. To quote him directly, he says “There are many misconceptions about helmets, unfortunately. We do not design helmets specifically to reduce chances or severity of injury when impacts involve a car.”
They are designed only to protect a cyclist who falls from their bike onto the ground. That type of an accident typically does not result in serious head injuries, so the protection offered is relatively slight.
Often there is a comparison made between wearing a cycle helmet on a bike and a seat belt in a car. That was the implied comparison when Judge Colin Daly cut the award to Raissa Lopes, who was cycling home from work on North Amiens Street in 2018, when a truck driver hit her. When the case came to court this year, Judge Daly cut her award by 20 per cent, because she wasn’t wearing a helmet at the time, despite no evidence that this would have reduced her injuries. He quite literally added insult to injury, effectively fining her thousands of euro for doing something that was entirely legal.
Now it is standard to reduce the award where someone is injured while not wearing a seat belt in a car, but there are two differences. Firstly, wearing a seatbelt is a legal requirement, wearing a cycle helmet is not.
Secondly, the evidence for the benefit of wearing seat belts is very strong. The evidence for the safety benefit of cycle helmets is not. I’ll get back to that.
But with that in mind, and particularly given the first part of this podcast about how RTÉ has effectively been captured by the motor industry, I listened carefully to the introduction of this piece on the News at One.
Now, if you want to wear a helmet when you cycle, that’s fine by me, but forcing people to do something against their will, that’s a whole other thing, especially if you don’t have very good, very clear justification for this compulsion.
And I’m going to pause here, because if you are sloppy enough, it’s easy to produce a soundbite or a Daily Mail headline that seems to prove this or that. But doctors, particularly medical researchers and clinicians are trained to be able to understand medical evidence, and not to fall into the trap of relying on attractive-sounding fallacies.
First of all, consider this. What if I offered you a pill, just one pill that, if you take it on your 21st birthday, you will be guaranteed not to die of Alzheimer’s disease? It’s not expensive, and it’s 100 per cent effective – would you take it?
It might sound good, until I tell you that the pill is cyanide. And it’s true, that if you take a cyanide pill on your 21st birthday, you are certain not to die of Alzheimer’s disease, that’s not a serious comparison but it shows how outcomes can be represented misleadingly.
To take a more real-world example, one that researchers actually have to deal with. Let’s take an imaginary disease, it’s pretty terrible, and it has a 50 per cent fatality rate. And let’s say we have a drug, and you can take this drug, and if you take this tablet every day, you will be guaranteed not to develop this disease. And this drug isn’t cyanide, I promise.
Now all drugs have some side-effects, but let’s say in this case they are relatively rare compared to getting the disease, it only kills one person in a thousand annually who takes the drug. Is the drug sounding good? Well 0.1 per cent fatality rate certainly sounds a hell of a lot better than 50 per cent, right?
Wrong. What if the disease only effects 100 Irish people every year. Fifty of them die, out of five million people. But everyone has to take the drug, five million people, and one in a thousand of them 5,000 people die from the side effects every year, 100 times more than the disease would kill, and that’s before you even factor in five million people having to take a pill every day.
So here’s a trick. If you see data that tells you rates, but doesn’t tell you absolute numbers, be suspicious. Researchers who know their stuff, people being honest with you, will tell you real numbers. A 0.1% death rate instead of 50% death rate sounds a hell of a lot different to saying 5,000 deaths instead of 50.
And, going back to my cyanide pill, the proper way to evaluate any treatment, or any safety measure, or any intervention is not to look at whether it works on one particular problem. The right thing to do is to look at the totality of the costs and benefits of the intervention, and compare them to the totality of the of the costs and benefits of the of not making the intervention.
With that in mind, I listened to what Dr Carol Blackburn had to say, and she said this.
So percentages, not figures. Red flag.
This is really important.
This is important because, although Dr Carol Blackburn seems to have a very impressive academic background, she is not presenting the data in a valid way, and she’s focussing on a single outcome, without telling us about the totality of the effect. Another red flag.
Something that we have to remember here is that Ireland is in the grip of an obesity crisis. 37 per cent of Irish adults are overweight and a further 23 per cent are actually obese – that’s incredibly bad, but among children, 25 per cent of them are overweight or obese. The figures are worse still for girls, and worse again for children from a poor background.
Have no doubt about it; the research is rock-solid. Excess weight, obesity and lack of exercise in childhood are the surest ticket to a lifetime if ill-health. And the reasons aren’t hard to find. Food is a big issue here, but get this: of primary school children, 81 per cent of them don’t get enough exercise; in secondary school, it’s 88 per cent. A child in an Irish school who gets enough exercise to have a healthy life, is an unusual child. The reason why girls are doing worse than boys seems to be that they give up sports earlier, for social reasons.
But 81 per cent of primary kids and 88 per cent of secondary kids not getting enough exercise to be healthy is a catastrophe that will cascade down the decades. One obvious solution is to get them on their bike; in particular get them cycling to school, and to other regular activities.
There is a reason why this by far the best option. You could try other exercise initiatives, bring kids to gyms or whatever, but this is prone to the New Year resolution effect. I’m sure you’ve done it. You have good intentions, you join the gym with one of the post-Christmas offers, you go a few times in January, and then you give up.
If you want exercise for yourself or your kids regularly, over an extended period, making it something that you have to go out of your way to do just won’t cut it. Human nature being what it is, it won’t take long before you lose the motivation to go out of your way.
To keep it up over an extended period, it has to be a behaviour that is integrated into your lifestyle. You’re not going to not bother with your cycle today, because that’s how you need to get home. That will benefit the child, and the evidence is that activity patterns established in childhood persist into adulthood, so it is a life-long health benefit.
That’s the reason why I found this particular comment from Dr Carol Blackburn so pernicious.
She is referring there to studies of what happened when various Australian states made it illegal to cycle without wearing a cycle helmet.
Now, I try to see the best in people. I usually go by the maxim that you should never attribute to malice, anything that can adequately be explained by stupidity. But I am having it very difficult indeed to find an adequate amount of stupidity to account Dr Blackburn’s statement here.
I’m very familiar with the research on the results of the Australian laws, and she is clearly an intelligent, well qualified person. She could not have the job she has without long training on how to understand epidemiological research.
What she said is not quite a lie, but it’s very, very close. It is certainly enormously dishonest.
I want to explain that and give the full context, and just to note here, I’m using proper, scientific research, published in peer-reviewed journals here. So what she said that hospitalisations of cyclists for head injuries for reduced when cycling was banned unless you wore a helmet.
That’s true. But the missing context is that hospitalisations of pedestrians for head injuries also reduced when cycling without a helmet was banned. In fact, it fact, head-injury hospitalisations of pedestrians and cyclists was reduced by almost exactly the same amount.
Now, I don’t think anyone imagines that a pedestrian is protected from head injuries by a cyclist somewhere else on the road wearing a helmet, so what’s going on here?
What was going on was an intense road safety campaign by the Australian police, directed at speeding and drunk drivers. So, given that the improvements were the same for both pedestrians and cyclists, the plausible explanation is that that is what caused the reduction in head injuries.
So, you might think, it’s not very impressive, but better safe than sorry, surely making cyclists wear a helmet can’t do any harm.
And you’d be wrong.
Because banning cycling helmets did have an effect. The number of people cycling collapsed. In Western Australia, for example, when the law was introduced, cycling dropped by between 30 and 40 per cent – these numbers are is from electronic traffic monitoring in Perth. Cycling among children collapsed by an even greater amount.
And there are a few reasons why even that is likely to be understating the effect of banning cycling without a helmet. First of all, this is the absolute number of cyclists, but it’s measured in a period when the population was increasing rapidly, so the prevalence of cycling was going down even more sharply.
This is despite the fact that the Western Australian state government was spending large amounts of money on promoting cycling, and that this happened in a period where petrol prices doubled. Despite this, the number of households that owned a bicycle dropped, the number of people saying in surveys that they intended to buy a bicycle dropped, the number of respondents who said they had given up cycling went up, and a large proportion said explicitly the reason they didn’t cycle was because of the helmet laws.
So, let’s go back to that where head injuries to cyclists dropped, but only by the same amount that they dropped for pedestrians. But that somewhat reduced number of head injuries to cyclists isn’t taking account of the fact that there were far fewer cyclists out there.
So, relative to pedestrians, the risk of a head injury to any given cyclist following the ban didn’t go down, it went up. And it went up by a lot. But that really seems counter-intuitive. Even if it’s no help, how could wearing a helmet law put a cyclist at more risk?
It’s not that big a mystery. The research data is that the more cyclists there are, the lower the prevalence cycling accidents, and it’s supported by data from several other countries too, including the Netherlands, the United States, and Denmark. Basically the more cyclists, there are, the more drivers are familiar with dealing with them on the roads.
So if the only thing that compulsory helmet laws did was cyclists off the roads, that would be bad enough.
But it doesn’t just drive them off the roads. It drives them towards a lifetime of poor health. Cycling is not inherently dangerous, quite the reverse. The calculations have been done, and taking everything into account, the number of life years gained through improved fitness is roughly 20 times higher than the number of life years lost in cycle fatalities.
So when Dr Carol Blackburn wants to people banned from cycling unless they wear a helmet, what she is doing is exactly analogous with giving everyone a cyanide pill on their 21st birthday, to save them from dying of Alzheimer’s.
